The vigilante group behind the sting that led to RTE producer Kieran Creaven's arrest have explained how they carried it out.

Predator Exposure is a group of activists who operate in the West Yorkshire area, with about 20 members in total.

One of the people they filmed, Creaven, appeared in court in Leeds on Monday where he was charged with attempting to meet a child under 16 following grooming and attempting to court or incite a girl aged 13 to 15 to engage in sexual activity, reports Dublin Live.

Predator Exposure have been operating for over a year now, after first starting when a friend of one of the members asked to track down a man messaging his teenage daughter.

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RTE sports producer Kieran Creaven

The founding member Phil told the Irish Independent: "After I got the offender who was contacting my friend’s daughter I got asked by other people if I could help out with people being messaging their daughters, so I just carried it on from there.

I started off by myself doing a decoy (making fictitious social media profiles) and now we've built up a team because there are that many of them out there.

"We cover West Yorkshire and all over this island. The group is growing.

Kieran Creaven

"All we do is make a fake profile and wait for men to ‘add’ that profile and start talking to us. We don't start talking to them. They talk to our fake profile.

"We set up the profile and our decoy will run that one profile from start to finish so there is continuity and they don't get mixed up with who they are supposed to be online."

(Image: PA)

Another member of the group explained they never start a conversation and give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

The man said: "We always give people the benefit of the doubt, we always give them a chance to block you, some of them do block, some of them don't.

"We don't use photos of children, because otherwise we’d be feeding them what they want."